What's the Matter With Ireland?

by Ruth Russell, The Devin-Adair Co (Creator)

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160 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2004

Reviews

[David Nichols · Rating 4 out of 5]

American journalist Ruth Russell visited Ireland in the spring of 1919, when the Irish Revolution remained in a hopeful phase. Sinn Fein had declared independence, but the guerilla war that would wrack the country had not truly begun. The revolutionaries could still dream big, and Russell traveled to several cities to gauge support for one of those dreams, that of a workers' republic. She found that poverty lay more heavily upon the island than the British yoke, found urban workers making starvation wages and rural tenants enserfed to the "gombeen men," and argued that true hope for Ireland's future lay in the labor-union and rural-cooperative movements. Independence would merely clear the way for the real struggle: the campaign to create a syndicalist or soviet-style government.

WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH IRELAND received praise from Sinn Fein leaders (including de Valera), but the future it projected for Ireland quickly became stillborn. In 1920 the Revolution turned violent, and by late 1921 the IRA and British forces had left hundreds of bodies and burnt-out ruins scattered across the island. Two years of bloodshed left the people of the 26 counties willing to settle for a bourgeois republic, and most of them were willing to give even that up for dominion status and peace. War may turn people radical, but civil war tends instead to push them toward right-wing authoritarianism.

[Differengenera · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Ten Days that Shook the World' for the early stages of Cogadh na Saoirse, albeit not as long or as detailed. worth seeking out, it's there on gutenberg